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New Prometheus Teaser: 2023 TED Talk

With the June release date of Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated film Prometheus inching ever closer, the director has released a teaser video directed by his son, Luke Scott, as a sort of viral marketing campaign for the film. The clip features Guy Pierce as the sophisticated and eloquent businessman, Peter Weyland of Weyland corporation, speaking at 2023 TEDtalk about the technological revolutions of the early 21rst century. While not actually a part of the film, the speech offers a tantalizing glimpse into what can be assumed will end up being the driving force behind Prometheus’ plot.

The clip is short, sweet, and surprisingly exciting. I was heartened to see that the set which the speech takes place is is reminiscent of the dark, gritty H.R. Giger designs of the earlier films. Yet what I found most intriguing, was Scott had somehow managed to make the technology in the seen look both advanced and stylistically similar to his original 1979 vision of the future at the same time. If you want to know what I’m talking about, take a look at the screens behind Weyland as he’s talking. Everything is projected in monochromatic, primary colors with extremely simplicity, just like the computers rendered the information in the earlier films. This is a really nice touch, considering that George Lucas was so focused on making everything look as fancy as possible in his prequels of the Starwars movies, that not only did none of the sets, characters or costumes seem to fit with the originals, but everything was so much more advanced and futuristic than the original films (which took place in the future) that nothing seemed to fit together. That and they sucked, but that’s a different story.

You can also tell that Luke and Ridley Scott wanted to give this scene as much legitimacy and believeablity as possible. Not only was this 2023 TEDtalk screened at the 2012 TEDtalk (and is currently hosted on their site,) but they tossed in a couple of really neat elements that drove the point home. One of which being a live twitter feed with tweets discussing what Weyland is talking about, as he’s discussing it on stage. Just like CNN or the presidential Twitter debates! How fun!

Check out the trailer below! Also, for your entertainment, I’m attaching the speech and speaker bio for Weyland listed on TEDtalk’s website.

About This Talk: Peter Weyland has been a magnet for controversy since he announced his intent to build the first convincingly humanoid robotic system by the end of the decade.

Whether challenging the ethical boundaries of medicine with nanotechnology or going toe to toe with the Vatican itself on the issue of gene-therapy sterilization, Sir Peter prides himself on his motto, “If we can, we must.” After a three year media blackout, Weyland has finally emerged to reveal where he’s heading next. Wherever that may be, we will most certainly want to follow.

About the Speaker: Sir Peter Weyland was born in Mumbai, India at the turn of the Millennium. The progeny of two brilliant parents; His mother, an Oxford Educated Professor of Comparative Mythology, his father, a self-taught software Engineer, it was clear from an early age that Sir Peter’s capabilities would only be eclipsed by his ambition to realize them. By the age of fourteen, he had already registered a dozen patents in a wide range of fields from biotech to robotics, but it would be his dynamic break-throughs in generating synthetic atmosphere above the polar ice cap that gained him worldwide recognition and spawned an empire. In less than a decade, Weyland Corporation became a worldwide leader in emerging technologies and launched the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth. “There are other worlds than this one,” Sir Peter boldly declared, “And if there is no air to breathe, we will simply have to make it.”